Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Watching and listening to the Republican ConventionI was hit by déjà vu. What is being played out has all happened before and Ipersonally witnessed the Rhodesia version.

In each instance the campaign model or strategywas/is the same. Instil fear. Whip up paranoia. Stir up apprehension.

Do this by taking the truth of the existence of athreat and turn it into the BIG LIE that a half-truth often is. Understand thata half-truth is often worse than the most pernicious lie.

Certainly Germany, like many other countries hadthreats to contend with. So too as regards Rhodesia and the USA. However, andit is very big however, none were/are under threat of being overrun by an externalenemy and everyone murdered in their beds or subjugated, as was at leastnotionally the case with Winston Churchill and the United Kingdom, forinstance. ISIS is a threat to the whole world, not just America.

In these situations, the common theme is that thecreated/imagined external enemy is then represented by a named proxy.

To Germany feel free to add the Polish. To Rhodesiafeel free to add “the Brits and Communists”. To the Trump camp feel free to addthe Mexicans, Chinese and all others that are now disrespecting, bullying andmaking America “small”.

In this way we see how human passions are inflamedat their most basic level. Thinking is replaced by feelings. Cognitive processis pushed out by emotion. Humans find themselves back in the cave stressed outby real and largely imagined threats out there, banding together, driven byirrational emotivism, engulfed by mob instinct.

The mob does not think. Once it is infused with themood of a mob it is only capable of following. It follows whosoever has beenposited as the leader. The leader has been created in the imagination of themob. This has been done by way of stentorian rhetoric that he is great; hecares; he will save you; he is a leader; he is strong … etc. … etc. … withhardly a shred of hard evidence that he has any of these attributes. There is NO hard evidence that Trump is any of the things that are beingclaimed about him. Neither is there a shred of evidence as to how he is goingto make America "safe" and "great again". Whatgives the leader credibility is mood and passion … not merit. The herd instinctis to follow, not to question.

The simplest of cognitive questioning would havemade it obvious to the German people that Hitler was a narcissistic demagogueon a diabolical mission. I was personally driven to distraction trying to getotherwise very bright White Rhodesians to see that Ian Smith’s gambit to tryand preserve White supremacy and minority rule was absolutely doomed tofailure.

At least the paranoia of White Rhodesians wasunderstandable. They did stand to lose their status of racial dominance. WithGermany the herd was induced into embracing Nazism and its fascist culture. TheTrump herd is on a similar path. It feels good about being a herd … aboutacting without question … following a new found leader, whose only credibilityis a torrent of narcissistic rhetoric about himself … about fear … about “usand them” … about lost greatness … about nationalism ... about regainingdominance … over others … dominance over all others.

Donald Trump is simply a narcissistic con man. Hehas spotted the real concerns that many American have, as articulated by Bernie Sanders and conjoined them to what Rhodesian Whites and many Americans feelabout losing their status of power and dominance over others.

So he has very artfully hijacked the RepublicanParty and turned its members into a mindless nationalistic herd with truth andjustice being suffocated in the dust being thrown up by their thunderinghooves.

Those thundering hooves are also trampling upon sacredAmerican values, destroying America’s status as the leader of the free worldand seeking to turn it into a pariah State. God help America.